About a month ago a friend gave me an Ithaca M66 single shot 20 ga shotgun that had a few small issues that I had fixed except for one. It looks like the barrel is bent slightly to the right. The bend looks to be in the middle of the barrel. How do you straighten something like that out? I know it is an inexpensive gun and I don't have much in it but it is in really nice shape, looks almost new.
thanks,

Jack K

Literally, you put it between two posts, or in the crotch of a tree, and bend it a little at a time. You must be able to shoot it to get the pattern shooting where you are looking, but this is how it is done. Some gunsmiths use jigs to get more control over the process, but some do not. An old gunsmith in Savannah would lay two bags of lead shot on the floor of his shop, on top of each other, and holding the barrels by the muzzle, bring them down like chopping with an axe onto the bags in such a way as to get the bend he needed.

It sounds like shade tree stuff, but I have seen it done perfectly on a M12 Winchester barrel by wedging it in a crack in a shooting bench and carefully bending it. A couple or three tries and the gun's pattern moved over perfectly.

SRH

What Stan said is what Weatherby did at the factory with every shotgun that came off the line. They were patterned and if they didn't meet specs a fellow on the floor used a long steel rod and put them in the barrel and literally bent them to hit specs.

I've bent a few barrels myself. They are softer than you think. I bent a little 20 ga. Ithaca 37 that had a polychoke and shot low.

I also bent another Ithaca, a 12 ga. Flues with 30 inch barrels that shot low. I knew I was risking springing a rib but it wasn't worth a damn as is. I put the barrels across two 2x4s on the floor and put my weight on them. Took a few attempts to get the bend to set in. Now they shoot ok and the ribs are still tight.

Jack K,
I watched my late friend Clovis LeJune hit one with a piece of 2x4, with a handle carved on it, twice. It shot where it pointed then. When he charged $25, the customer complained, asking Are you going to charge me $25 to hit my barrel with a 2x4? June answered No, that is free, I'm charging you to know where and how hard to hit it. After the customer left, he told me he had tried every way he could think of to straighten them, including putting them between centers in his lathe and pushing with the back end of a tool in the tool post. Since barrels are thin wall tubes, they are easy to "kink" if you don't know what you are doing. I've heard of others using the methods described above, and watched Helmut Kerner and Rudi Henneberger regulate one for me with a reamer. One turned the reamer from the breech end and the other "crowded" the reamer over to the side, with a "yoke". This just means "whatever works, works".
Mike

I have a Three Barrel Gun Co. 16g Damascus over 30-30 that was fallen on forever ago and ALL Three tubes were bent to one side about a 1/4".

I sent the set to Merrington and he got them straightened out without having to take the ribs off. Dont ask me how.

I have a very good friend who started out shooting model 12's as a kid probably in the sixties. I have a Remington model 31 and an Ithaca built in 1976 that shot left. He had a large tool similar to a gear puller and he bent both barrels. He got the 31 on the money in one try. The 37 just kept springing back. We gave up on the 37.

When I toured the Krieghoff factory a few years back in Ulm, Germany, they showed me the tool they used to straighten barrels. It was not much different than what Stan described. If I remember correctly one of the posts you would rest the barrel on was actually a concave wheel that could be moved along the length of the barrel to the right spot. The gunsmith would just apply pressure once the two points of contact were where he wanted them.

The part I remember more distinctly was that the guide illustrated it had to be in an area were the gunsmith had the right kind of light to be able to see the bend and be able to adjust it correctly.

Browning a5 barrels are fairly easy to bend. I use to place a bag of shot on a flat surface and hit the barrel like it was a bat and the bag was a ball. I've seen trap shooters place a barrel in between the crotch of a tree or between boards on a fence and bend it that way. It was all trial and error to adjust for poi. My browning was bent while loaned to a friend. Don't know if he dropped it or used it when he fell walking across the marsh. But it was clearly bent which was not that hard to fix.

When I was young in western PA there were many stories of 4E's being struck on shot bags to change where they shot.

bill

I saw the same gunsmith (Clovis LeJune) that Der Ami saw at work, this time though he put the bent shotgun barrel set between centers in his lathe and whopped it with a large black rubber hammer, hard. It wasn't mine, thankfully. He had some sort of a spiral wire device attached to a naked light bulb in his shop, and looked through the barrels at that device, put it back in the lathe, whopped it again, looked at it toward his device again, and pronounced it fixed. I guess his method evolved over time, but I do not know which method was first and which last.

Gents,
I'm going to give the fork of a tree a try. I have just the tree. Thank you all for your input, will report back when I get it done.

Jack K

Larry,
It was 68 or 69 when I saw him; come to think about it, it was only a couple days before opening day of Dove season, so it must have been 68. In 69 , at that time of the year, I had taken my Company to Mississippi to fight Hurricane Camille.
Mike

Better fighting hurricane Camella in '69 instead of Charlie.

Ky Jon,
That came in 70, 36th Engineer Bn.(const.),34th Engineer Gp, 20th Engineer Bde. Vinh Long RVN.; any brothers on the board?

All of the methods discussed are legitimate, though some I would not allow to be used on my gun. The point about creating a KINK is the most important statement made. Remember that you can also create a wrinkle by repeating the process too many times.

I vote for Stan's tree method because it is possible to find an infinite variety of smooth round branches of varying thickness and spacing. Every bend has two end points and a center which must be correctly identified before you start and monitored during the process. Otherwise, you are relying on luck. Consider asking several people with excellent vision to point out the bend and marking it with a stick-on. Then you will not lose it during the actual bending.